Thanks to ATC reader bounce for putting me on the debug trail.
Long story short - the preview form was missing the contents of the mt.js file, whereas the entry pages weren't. So hitting "comment" instead of "preview" would work just fine, whereas hitting "preview" and then "post" would throw an error message, as the page was trying to pass a bunch of variables that it knew nothing about.
I could have stripped out this functionality, but I'd prefer to keep as much of the base MT commenting logic in place, should I want to activate the Captcha system, require readers to register in order to comment, or any of the other forms of Spam Control. The kind of arsenal I wish I had for DCR, really.
So, that's been fixed.
I'll make some aesthetic modifications in a few weeks - after Convergence has been re-finished, after I have a few other things done.
Any other problems I should know about?
[This page is a friggin' spam magnet. On the off chance it's the comment, the contents have been eradicated. if it's something else, I'll get it fixed with the next version of the website.]